Shaped by Sound Deep Dive: Superchunk

Indie rock powerhouses Superchunk are up next for PBS NC's SHAPED BY SOUND, with their episode airing on Thursday, February 20th at 9:30 PM. Over the course of twelve LPs and countless EPs and singles, the band’s mapped out a sound and ethos for alt rock in North Carolina and beyond. Superchunk and Merge Records’ hooky, frenetic form of indie remains influential and vital today.

And to get y’all ready for next Thursday, we at Come Hear NC have compiled a playlist of our 35 favorite tracks from The Chunk, spanning from their early single days, on to their mid-fi late 90s-2000s period and through to 2022’s WILD LONELINESS. 

Here are nerdy deep dive annotations to all 35 tracks on the mix: 

1. "Rainy Streets": the rare keyboard-and-drum lead Superchunk song, drummer Jon Wurster starts the song with a very heavy, inventive fill -- the short song starts abruptly in medias res, at full intensity and never lets up. Thought Superchunk have some more conventional narrative songs with beginnings, middles and ends, they more often build songs around symbolic images like the rainy streets of the title (look for other such songs later in the mix and commentary). These songs are more impressionistic than naturalistic, and in this case a description of a street scene's wet weather becomes a metaphor for keeping faith in hard times.
2. "The Popular Music": a song that begins with a lyric about feeling struck by lightning with a feedback-laden electric guitar intro from Mac McCaughan, Superchunk are masters of matching sonic texture to lyric. An angsty breakup song, featuring some clever metaphors for a riven relationship: mosaics made from broken china, cold pillows, a glimpse of a ex-lover's hair dyed by someone new.
3. "White Noise": an outtake from the group's Jim O'Rourke produced banger COME PICK ME UP, perhaps the band thought it was a little too poppy and direct for inclusion on that album, with a catchy riff and Mac McCaughan singing more prettily than usual. Another song with a metaphor doing the narrative heavy lifting -- "white noise" as a symbol for the nervous energy keeping people connected who maybe don't belong together long-term.
4. "Driveway to Driveway": one of Superchunk's most beloved songs, a 1990s indie rock classic, with an iconic video. From their breakthrough LP FOOLISH, this one tells a more straightforward story of drunken young love.
5. "Hello Hawk": On INDOOR LIVING, Superchunk's sound separation and mid-fidelity had risen on the production-side. But with COME PICK ME UP and on "Hello Hawk," Jim O'Rourke introduced more explicit studio experimentation into the mix. An orchestral chamber pop feel comes into its own on songs like this one, with O'Rourke adding bubbling-and-bending texture beds beneath Mac's vocals on the choruses.
6. "Phone Sex": A pop song with a beautiful pedal steel line, as close to a country rock as The Chunk ever got. A prescient song on mediated loneliness and the stochastic catastrophes of contemporary life.
7. "Hyper Enough," one of the biggest Superchunk anthems, a song again in which the buoyant dual-guitar lines mimic the mood, the hyperness of the lyric.  
8. "Like a Fool": lead-in song of FOOLISH (and origin of the record title), a hypnotic, slow-build track, like Pavement's "Silence Kid" seemingly engineered to rope in every lonely, tender and insecure alt kid in 1994.  
9. "Precision Auto": rougher and rawer Superchunk, closer to the punky origins of the group, with heavy-layered guitars in the verses leading to an incredibly catchy chorus.
10. The First Part": Mac's heliuminated vocals rides a jaggedly dynamic, hooky rocker, another FOOLISH classic album cut.  
11. "The Hot Break":  A HERE'S TO SHUTTING UP non-album track, a compact and rocking ode to a once closer lover-or-friend, a concise representation of the distant affection you feel for ghosts from your past you don't or can't see too often anymore.
12. "Detroit Has a Skyline": a look back at the intense relationships forged on tour, with references to Denver and the titular Detroit forming the backdrop of a story about the ephemeral but strong bonds made sharing stages and vans. Mac has said that the album he sings of having "played track 6, track 7 again, again" was by Belly, American Music Club, or Everything But The Girl.
13. Kicked In": another effortless FOOLISH anthem, and song from which the band Rocket Fuel is the Key got their name.
14. "Florida's on Fire": an oblique allegorical representation of the Bush V. Gore 2000 Election Recount controversy, but which avoids anti-Florida potshots now familiar in today's popular culture.
15. "Low Branches": another COME PICK ME UP jam on which Jim O'Rourke was obviously treating every instrument, with Wurster's drums, the guitars, bass, and vocals all sonically tinkered with to produce a slightly claustrophobic feel.
16. "Song for Marion Brown": a wistful, ambivalent but hard rocking take on the commercialization of black music (and music more generally) in America, centered upon the legendary (and still underrated) jazz sax player Marion Brown. Brown was older but still alive when the song was created, hence the present tense of the POV. The song's coda is a glorious crib from The Who's "Baba O'Reilly."
17. "My Gap Feels Weird": a more recent Chunk banger, with a dense, satisfying crunch to the verses and a catchy chorus. As a parent myself, I guessed on first listen that the chorus was taken from a child talking about losing a tooth, and was satisfied to read in an interview that the line indeed was inspired by something McCaughan's daughter had said to him from the back seat of their car.
18. "Her Royal Fisticuffs": a lesser-known romp from THE LAUGHTER GUNS EP.
19. "Burn Last Sunday": everyone's had a day so bad they've felt the need to ritually burn it away before moving on, no?
20. "Throwing Things": from Superchunk's second LP, an early sign of their ability to structure an anthem that went beyond the usual punk blast of raw energy.
21. "Brand New Love": a more rocking version of Sebadoh's 90's lo-fi emo anthem "Brand New Love," an overwrought exploration of male jealousy and insecure attachment, turned here by Superchunk into a more upbeat track.
22. "Why Do You Have to Put a Date on Everything?": a negotiation between a Type A planner and a go-with-the-flow improviser, equally applicable to a romantic relationship, running a record label (Merge Records, wink wink), and maybe an internally conflicted indie rock singer?
23. "1000 Pounds": an anti-bullying song before such things were cool, a song of support to an awkward young girl who has fought the odds to break away from what was holding her back.
24. "Late Century Dream": As in the 20th Century, kids -- here the metaphor for life in the dwindling years before 2000 is the knot, with a play on knot/not for the dual pull of feeling pulled every-which-way and yet feeling a lurking void at the center of modern life.  
25. "City of the Dead": The most recent song on this mix, from 2022's WILD LONELINESS, a song about knowing all the big things that need to change in the world but needing to focus on small zones of change. Notable for its prominent acoustic guitar-only section in the first half, something the band would previously break out live and on B-sides, but rarely if ever on LPs.
26. "Pink Clouds": another great two-word environmental image song from Superchunk (see "Watery Hands," "Low Branches," "Rainy Streets,"), featuring a full horn section coda presumably charted by Jim O'Rourke, and played by indie jazz legend Ken Vandermark and Bob Weston from Shellac.
27. "Out On the Wing":  The song with HERE'S TO SHUTTING UP in its title, one of many songs on the album with eerie airplane imagery (the album came out September 18, 2001), making it an unintentionally healing record for myself and others in the aftermath of 9/11.      
28. "Marquee": A slower tempo affair than most song here, this middle pacer seems to be a meditation about what it means to sell-out (or remain independent), as Mac muses on his relationship to another musician with their own publicist, marquee with their name in lights, and big act (in more sense than one).
29. "The Breadman": An early anthemic track, maybe a shout-out to a friend that worked at Chapel Hill diner/breakfast staple Breadman's on Rosemary Street in the late 80s/early 90s?
30. "Unbelievable Things": A more sinister-sounding vocal and lyric than usual from McCaughan, a song that seems to be about the difficulty women can have in avoiding the cages men use to exert control over them.     
31. "So Convinced": Here's what drummer (and talented tour diarist and comedian) Jon Wurster wrote about the recording of this song, the lead-off from COME PICK ME UP: "My main memory of recording this number is coming back into the control room after completing the first take and coming face to face with the Frogs. The guys were in town and stopped by to visit Jim O and hung around just long enough to make things a little weird-in a good way (I think). Probably one of our shortest songs to date and would not be at all out of place on Let’s Active’s Afoot EP. Laura and Mac doin' the “heys”. O'Rourke’s running of the drums through a gadget he called “the Ettenower 2001” accounts for the craziness of the first 20 seconds."
32. "Watery Hands": As close to a perfect pop song as Superchunk has ever recorded, a day at the beach and its diversions as a metaphor for the joys and struggles of sustaining a long-term relationship.
33. "Pulled Muscle":  The chorus is a master class in vocal multi-tracking, as a distorted undertone intones chorus lines, adding urgency to the song's calls for love and affection.   
34. "Refracting":  Another newer track, an acoustic-electric hybrid arrangement and ode to wasting time and what Vic Chesnutt once called "stupid preoccupations."
35. "The Only Piece That You Get": The slow magnetic coda of ON THE MOUTH, a song about not settling for less, and a great last track for any mix/playlist.